On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 01:08:22PM +0100, Margery Allcock wrote: > I often wonder: languages must have begun as spoken sounds and words, long > before alphabets and spelling came along. > > So, once alphabets turned up, who applied the letters (and combinations) to > the sounds? And did each scribe choose their own rules? Was that why it > took centuries for spelling to settle down?
I suppose so... I think for a long time nobody even thought of coming up with standardized spelling. > And why did the spelling rules turn out so different in different countries? That's definitely an interesting question... No idea. I think a lot of it depends on how much the language (pronounciation especially) changed since the spelling was "set in stone" - if there was a lot of changes, you can end up with pronounciation completely different from spelling. I wonder if any languages actually update their spelling to match new pronounciation... Seems like good idea, but hard to implement, since it'll make your writing look like it just has lots of spelling errors in it. > For instance, when I learned conversational German, our lovely teacher first > taught us the German spelling/sounds correspondence so we could read signs > out loud, before trying to learn the words; once we could hear the sounds, > the words might sound like English words and that helped us to pick up some > meaning. It was really useful. The same applies to Polish. I taught Geoffrey to pronounce Polish words, so he can do that fine even though he has no idea what they mean. He says it comes in useful for math theorems named after Polish people, and such. The one major non-obvious aspect of Polish spelling is what we call "orthography": there are just three pairs of letters (or letter combinations) that are pronounced the same but written differently, so we have to memorize which one is used in what words. I can't write which ones they are, since they involve funny Polish signs. The reason for that problem is apparently that when the spelling was established, those letters were still pronounced differently, but it's changed since then. Sort of like English in slow motion - I wonder if after a few more millenia we'll end up with completely non-phonetic spelling in Polish too, due to pronounciation changes... Or maybe because everyone knows how to read and write now, we'll just have fewer pronounciation changes in order to stay consistent with the spelling. Linguistics is fun... Weronika -- Weronika Patena Stanford, CA, USA http://vole.stanford.edu/weronika To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
